The OpenStack Blog
Everything in & around OpenStack in written words.

Atlanta Summit, Day 2: Speed and Innovation

We’re well into day two of the OpenStack Summit here in Atlanta, with a wonderful keynote presentation this morning lead by Chief Operating Officer, Mark Collier.

He looked at innovation through a historical lens, detailing the ways in which OpenStack can help companies move faster.

“It has a lot to do with this massive transformation that is going on throughout the entire economy,” Collier explained. “There is a revolution going on inside of global corporations. Every company has to move faster. Every company is now competing with a startup.”

Drawing further upon that point, he pulled some interesting statistics to illustrate the importance of speed and agility. According to Collier, “75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027”.

AT&T, Sony, and DigitalFilm Tree were all featured Superusers that spoke to the value OpenStack has provided them. Toby Ford, AVP of IT Strategic Realization at AT&T, described the competitive advantage OpenStack is able to offer.

“AT&T has to move faster to compete, and OpenStack is helping to do that because we can expand to include workloads like Network Function Virtualization,” said Ford. “I’m confident in the model, people & in the adoption that’s happened. Expand the paradigm & think about OpenStack more broadly.”

Following an impressive video around the MLB ‘14 The Show release for Playstation 4, Sony’s own Platform Architect, Joel Johnston, described the usability of OpenStack on the back end. From a performance perspective, by bringing OpenStack in-house, the engineering staff at Sony can be sure that a real-time element exists.

In a comical “Between 2 Ferns” parody, DigitalFilm Tree CTO Guillaume Aubuchon explained OpenStack’s true prominence within their business. As he described, “OpenStack is the cornerstone to almost every television show that DigitalFilm Tree does”. He also harped on the importance of spreading OpenStack’s message, stating that “…the next step for OpenStack is education. We need to educate a broader range of people.”

From the Field:

Check out the photo booth at the Superuser experience in the hallway on Level 2 to take home a memory from the Summit. There are a ton of fun props, and we’ll feature you in the OpenStack Marketplace in the Expo Hall.

The OpenStack Design Summit kicked off today! Users and developers can enter on Level 3, and you can view the full schedule of events here: http://junodesignsummit.sched.org/